Perceptual Organization

Perceptual organization

Everything we see, we see for the first time. While parts of a scene may correspond to
objects we have some previous acquaintance with, we almost never see the same objects in
the same configuration under the same lighting conditions from the same perspective.

Unless we can decompose a scene into coherent and independently recognizable entities,
the complexity of natural scenes would render humantype vision impossible. How can we
partition a scene into independent components without already knowing without what might
be present? There are probably thousands of objects that can appear in an almost infinite
variety of configurations and orientations that we can recognize, exhaustive matching
against stored models is not a reasonable explanation of human perception.

It is largely agreed that there must be a set of generic criteria, applied
independently of scene content that underlies the procedures discovered by nature for
partitioning the visual field. Discontinuities in scene properties (distance,
material composition, motion, etc.) are the most likely clues as to where partitioning or
perceptual organization problem.

Psychologists have attempted to discover the laws underlying the partitioning decisions
made by the human visual system. One of the earliest and intuitively most acceptable
collections of such laws was proposed by Wertheimer in 1923 and elaborated by Koffka in
1935.

These Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization include:

The Law
of Proximity: Stimulus elements that are closed together tend to be perceived as a
group

The Law of Similarity: Similar stimuli tend to be grouped, this tendency can
even dominate grouping due to proximity

The Law of Closure: Stimuli tend to be grouped into complete figures

The Law of Good Continuation: Stimuli tend to be grouped as to minimize change
or discontinuity

The Law of Symmetry: Regions bound by by symmetrical boarders tend to be
perceived as coherent figures

The Law Simplicity: Ambiguous stimuli tend to be resolved in favor of the
simplest